1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic record systems and, more particularly, to devices that generate codified electronic records.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Institute of Medicine has reported that approximately 100,000 deaths occur per year in the United States due to preventable medical errors. This, in part, is the reason for a massive world wide effort to move to electronic health record (EHR) systems. Some EHR systems do exist today; however, such systems are not integrated in a manner that allows efficient sharing of medical records between medical facilities. Further, existing EHR systems do not capture a level of detail required to automatically analyze patient data.
Another obstacle hindering widespread implementation of EHR systems is that such systems do not seamlessly integrate with current medical practices. For instance, clinicians usually are trained to dictate a patient condition into a recorder using a textual commentary that interweaves potential and excluded diagnosis with positive and negative indications in a run-on sentence format. Such sentence structure normally exceeds the trusted ability of standard computerized text analysis tools. Thus, automated analysis of text currently is not a viable option. Instead, a medical transcription service is used to subsequently transcribe the dictation into a text document that can be stored in the clinician's office with other patient records. The transcribed text typically does not contain medical codes that are compliant with EHR systems, however. Moreover, medical transcription is labor intensive, time consuming, and error prone.
It therefore would be beneficial to provide a system for documenting patient information that is both accurate and efficient.